Ruby Cohn (1922–2011)

Ruby Cohn (1922–2011) Jill Levenson and Hersh Zeifman Ruby Cohn, the distinguished scholar who helped to define the field of modern drama, contributed vitally to the journal Modern Drama for more than thirty years. In her long struggle with Parkinson’s disease and her death on 18 October 2011, she left her friends both in the academy and in the theatre feeling that a significant era had ended. Among them, those of us who worked with her on Modern Drama know the degree to which she set the highest standards for criticism of the subject, relatively new when the journal appeared more than fifty years ago. A. C[arroll] Edwards launched Modern Drama in May 1958, at the time when Ruby began to establish herself as a Beckett specialist. With his foreword to the first number, he seemed to articulate what would become the guiding principles of her career: “The purpose of Modern Drama is, first of all, to stimulate interest in research and in the teaching of drama since Ibsen. Modern Drama will provide space for those whose studies have resulted in discoveries which merit dissemination beyond the classroom.” By the time Carroll Edwards wrote those words as the sole editor of Modern Drama, Ruby had discovered Samuel Beckett’s writings as a graduate student at the University of Paris, having seen the first public performance of En attendant Godot in January 1953. “I came to Godot with no background,” she later wrote. “And yet I knew almost at once that those two French-speaking tramps were me; more miserable, more lovable, more humorous, more desperate. But me.” When she returned to the United States and took a second doctorate at Washington University, St. Louis, she wrote a thesis on Beckett which became her first book, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (1962). She published her first article on Beckett even earlier, in 1959, after it had been rejected by an editor who wrote to her: “We like your criticism, but we don’t find your author merits publishing space.” Between May 1958 and December 1966, Modern Drama became a more ambitious publication. It expanded from sixty-seven pages to more than 100, and its masthead listed, among other staff, three Associate Editors and two Foreign Editors. Ruby and Modern Drama first came together in a special issue of the journal devoted to Beckett in December 1966, [End Page 405] which she edited and which reveals notable features of her scholarly and personal style. In it she has collected fifteen essays from a wide range of writers, from Wolfgang Iser to Richard Schechner. She divides the papers into three groups with titles that not only guide a reader through a wealth of new material, but also play on words: “Overviews,” “Godotology,” “Singulars.” In her one-page introduction with its ambiguous and meaningful title, “Acting for Beckett,” she manages to summarize his career to date. The prose is perfectly clear throughout, from the start where she offers facts (“Samuel Beckett’s absorption in the performing arts has been profound and sustained”) to the end where she presents a theory (“Aristotelian drama, which imitates an action, is crystallized by Beckett to the acting which is all we know of living”). In her own essay, with its characteristically witty title “The Beginning of Endgame,” she analyses Beckett’s revisions of the play’s earlier and final texts. Her preciseness and respect for both versions anticipate the best kind of textual criticism that would emerge in the 1980s. By 1967 Modern Drama had added a fourth Associate Editor, Ruby Cohn; and she would remain on the masthead in various editorial capacities (member of the Editorial Board, Special Issues Editor, as well as Associate Editor) throughout her long association with the journal. When Modern Drama moved from Lawrence, Kansas to Toronto, Ontario and from the stewardship of Carroll Edwards to that of Fred Marker, she came too, as a member of the Editorial Board, and continued to write for the journal. The second editor in Canada, Jill Levenson, found her advice indispensable in every way, whether assessing a submission or formulating a topic for a special issue or, in 1977, suggesting a book review...

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